Turning Centripetal Politics on its Head: How Italian Polarization in the 1950s and 1960s Helps to Understand America’s Crisis Today

Cosmos Talk

Sidney Tarrow, Cornell University
Turning Centripetal Politics on its Head: How Italian Polarization in the 1950s and 1960s Helps to Understand America’s Crisis Today

Abstract
As a product of the American political science of the 1960s and 1970s, I grew up intellectually in an age of “American exceptionalism” (Almond and Verba) and “Italian centrifugality” (Sartori). I argue that it was a mistake to ignore the potential comparisons between the two. Drawing on the “consociational” models of Lijphart and his followers and the “subcultural pluralism” of Bagnasco and Trigilia, this talk makes an effort to compare two models of polarization: the Italian “imperfect bipartism” of the 1960s and 1970s, and the American “big sort” of today. Observing that neither case is as exceptional as Americanists and comparativists think, I argue that the Italian polarization of the 1960s and 1970s can help us understand America’s crisis today.